ONE of the things the Tories are really good at – admittedly not words I normally use as a Glasgow MP – is coming up with simple campaign phrases that stick in peoples’ minds.

“Vote Leave, Take Back Control”. “Get Brexit Done”. “Levelling Up”. These are just a few of the big Tory party messages in recent years.

All of them are actually vacuous nonsense but they’re really effective in terms of making folk think that the Tories actually have a plan to make our lives better. Spoiler: they don’t. In reality, all the Tories have are snappy soundbites and no substance.

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Unfortunately for our city we recently learned yet again that the British Government often delivers little more than empty rhetoric.

Until fairly recently in Glasgow you couldn’t turn a street corner without seeing billboard adverts from the British Government talking about levelling up “in your area”.

So, not unfairly, the council here in Glasgow thought “okay, let’s apply for some of that”.

Despite recently making seven impressive bids for Levelling Up funding, Glasgow was snubbed and awarded nothing. Zilch. Hee-haw.

The reaction across Glasgow to this latest Westminster snub – both from politicians and civic society – has been fierce.

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Our city lost out, it would seem, so that Tory constituencies and target seats could have money funnelled into them. Yes, it really was as blatant as that.

Rishi Sunak, who previously caused controversy after he was secretly filmed boasting about taking money from deprived urban areas and redirecting it to more affluent parts of the UK, has made sure that his own wealthy constituency in rural Yorkshire received £19 million.

The South East of England, hardly known for deprivation, has had buckets of cash siphoned in.

That isn’t levelling up – it’s levelling down.

Our funding applications – one for every Westminster constituency in Glasgow – were well thought through and each had the potential to deliver real transformative change for the benefit of everyone living here.

One of the bids was for a part of my constituency in desperate need of regeneration funding.

Since summer last year, I have been trying to make the British Government sit up and take notice of the need for Easterhouse to finally get its fair share.

The proposal would have allowed enhancement of the Lochs Shopping Centre building, public realm improvements at key access points, including the car park and public entrances, and wider access improvements to the active travel network, particularly focused on links to existing facilities and the Seven Lochs Wetland Park.

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Late last year, I asked to meet the Levelling Up Secretary, Michael Gove, to make the case for the Easterhouse town centre proposal. He told me he was “too busy” to hear about Easterhouse’s plea for cash.

If levelling up is truly about lifting up areas which have been left behind and impacted by deprivation, then overlooking Easterhouse makes no sense whatsoever.

Over and above the decades of austerity inflicted on us by Westminster Governments we didn’t vote for, Easterhouse recently had its Jobcentre – a vital resource in tackling high unemployment in the area – shut down by the out-of-touch Department for Work and Pensions.

Having deserted and abandoned Easterhouse, the UK Government has once again doubled down on its betrayal of Glasgow.

Looking at the funding distribution and seeing just how well the South East of England did, it frankly looks less like levelling up and more like topping up the obscene levels of wealth in that part of these islands.

Glasgow is a great city and its best asset truly is the folk who live here – hence the slogan People Make Glasgow – but there is no doubt that decades of austerity, deindustrialisation and economic storms have taken their toll on our city.

A little investment can give our Dear Green Place the chance to shine. Take for example the fantastic new state-of-the-art purpose-built TV studio in Kelvin Hall, co-funded by the Scottish Government and Glasgow City Council. This represents jobs, opportunity, and growth.

COP26 showed Glasgow at its best – a modern, dynamic and outward-looking city with a great story to sell. But it’s not acceptable for British Government politicians to jet in for a big climate conference, show their international counterparts around Finnieston and then fly back out, only to reject not only our Levelling Up funding applications but even the opportunity to discuss them.

Throughout and since the 2014 referendum, we were told that Scotland should stay, indeed that we should lead, rather than leave, the United Kingdom. Westminster pled with Scots and succeeded in asking people to politely decline the opportunity of a better future with yet another hollow catchphrase – “No Thanks”.

To finish how I began, I’ll give the Tories credit one last time by admitting that they haven’t completely abandoned that particular slogan.

Because when Glasgow came calling for the Levelling Up cash that it so deserves, the British Government revealed the full version: “Levelling Up Glasgow? No Thanks!”